MovieChat Forums > Stealing Beauty (1996) Discussion > Could anyone explain the title, please?

Could anyone explain the title, please?


Being not a native speaker of English, the title "Stealing Beauty" remains ambiguous and somewhat enigmatic to me.
Who does steal? The beauty? Or is/gets the beauty stolen?
In the trailer I just watched here on imdb the off voice speaks of "beauty that will steal your hearts..." - well, okay, that makes some sense, to a degree...
But could the title not be meant ambiguously, intentionally? There are at least two more ways 'reading' it: 1) Beauty is/gets 'stolen', which rises the question of what/whose beauty, and stolen by whom?
2) I can imagine another, rather far-fetched understanding of "Stealing Beauty", namely the rhyming-associative sound of "Sleeping Beauty"... There's quite some sleep, sleepiness 'placed' in the film, and it might be worth pondering the deeper meaning of this - well, but let's not become it a Lynch-esque dream jigsaw. :-))

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i didn't even think of the sleeping beauty angle, ha! good one.

SPOILERS: i think there's a sense of "stealing beauty" as something to do with imagined pleasures from false pretenses or surface follies (everyone's obsession w/ the girl's beauty, disillusioned w/ the man who the girl thought would be perfect to take her virginity/her ridiculous "romantic" idea of reliving her own conception, the road beyond one of the hills where they go hiking being a spot to pick up young prostitutes, the matron finally breaking down and wanting to go home from that artificial "paradise", the artist really being the girls' father and both of them agreeing to still keep it a secret).

At least that's one interpretation for the title...and I think it reflects a few ideas Bertolucci has dealt with in other films--especially with The Dreamers w/ his critique of the surface idealism of french youth in the 1960s, the hypocrisy or fallacies of their thoughts/words/actions, and the shallowness of style without substance/conviction/"proofs of love".

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[deleted]

IMO Beauty is some kind of force (or power) behind Lucy. She is the beauty and she is the object of fascination. They all want to "steal" that something from her. She is young, beautiful and innocent, so she emphasises everything they would like to have, but they don't. Their illusion is her truth.

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You found another beautiful way to put it.
She is a metaphor of the world, we need beauty; We need to feed on it.

Godspeed

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The literal translation from the Italian is "I Dance Alone." The English title was probably tacked on for marketing purposes.

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Well, since this is a co-productucion, it's hard to tell which title is really the original one. (in Polish cinemas it was entitled "Hidden Desires")

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I would say the English title got the best of the deal by a wide margin, then.

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Here is an excerpt from the movie comment by "i-got-away". I think that it explains exactly what you are asking:

The location itself is one of the characters, and it is beautifully shot, the colours saturated and rich. It feels like you can touch the stones, smell the air, feel the grass and flagstones beneath your bare feet. If you don't want to go to Tuscany after seeing this film, you are ill or on the wrong medication. The beauty that is being stolen, or that people want to steal, is not just the beauty of the young virgin on the hill, it is the beauty of life, of living, of learning, of looking back and finally giving it all up, knowing it cannot be stolen. I know that some people criticize Bertolucci for his aesthetic, for bringing the beauty out of every moment, even the horrible ones, and I say to those people that they live the life they choose.

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- We all steal beauty from the world. We need it as we live, as we create (the object of the artist, or creating life), as we comply to life, as one's loses one's virginity. (from PG Sep3 2009)

-IMO Beauty is some kind of force (or power) behind Lucy. She is the beauty and she is the object of fascination. They all want to "steal" that something from her. She is young, beautiful and innocent, so she emphasises everything they would like to have, but they don't. Their illusion is her truth. (Fripper Sep25 2009)

- She is a metaphor of the world, we need beauty; We need to feed on it. (PG Sep25 2009)

- We need to feed on Lucy’s beauty as we feed on life. We need to steal her beauty. Lucy will herself need to feed on beauty (that of nature: hers, the country, nature, artists' creations, people...) and will - in a way - lose hers when she loses her virginity to life, but she will gain life and beauty on another level.
Life feeds on stealing beauty, then becoming beauty itself.

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I now relate the title to Lucy's story, i.e., Ian "stealing" Lucy's mother's "beauty" when he took her in the olive grove and impregnated her.

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Once again, no freaking proof Ian was the father. And if he was, she should have crippled him, not gotten him freaking flowers and hugged him.

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